The question is — why did we believe this lie in the first place? It’s clear those who wanted homosexual marriage weren’t after freedom. They were after acceptance and applause for their lifestyle choices. So why did we ever believe this? “What harm does a homosexual couple getting married do to you?”

It all depends on whether or not I’m forced to take part in the celebration, doesn’t it? And it’s looking increasingly like everyone will be forced to participate — they’ll be trolling churches, dragging people into these weddings. It will become something of a “litmus test,” if the current presidential campaign is any indicator.

“Have you ever been to a gay wedding?”

The question is asked breathlessly, in an almost rhetorical style. For what answer can you give that will not brand you as a bigot but “yes?” It’s the new inquisitional test — the wrong answer will land you out of a job, out of polite society, out of life. You will be “unhumaned,” placed beneath the dignity of even being recognized as a person in the proper sense.

Everyone is tired. I don’t have to be told — I can see it in the faces of those I meet, and in the faces of those I see standing in line at the airport, at the store, even at church. This sort of tiredness isn’t just about getting too little sleep, although there is plenty of that going around, but rather a tiredness we barely recognize yet. Perhaps, like the fish who will never discover water, we will never discover this tiredness, never see it for what it really is, because we are immersed in it. What kind of tiredness is this?

Perhaps we should call it motion tiredness. The angst of constant motion.

It is the tiredness of a treadmill, the tiredness of Sisyphus, always moving and never really getting anywhere. We are like travelers on a huge ship, always moving with the waves of new trends and things, and never really getting anyplace. The deck pitches under us, before us, around us, throwing our values, our institutions, our ground, overboard, leaving no place to stand. We need look no further than the world of technology for the perfect description — folks deeply involved in technology have long known the motion sickness of constant change. For instance —

Progress is a fine thing in measure. But the progressive ideal has broken out and become the foundation of our world — a constantly shifting deck as the only steady foundation on which to build. This motion tiredness has stretched to our political world, where there is no law, only change posing as law. There is so much outrage anger spends itself on the rocks of “too much.” There is so much “hope and change” that all the hope and change blends into the countryside like a blur of waves as we pass over the sea tossing the ship too and fro. This motion tiredness has stretched to the social world, where hashtags spring up overnight, then disappear in the wake behind us like foam; a meaningless nothing glittering on the top of the wave for a moment before being swept under. People become stars when they’re young (“she’s so cute”), grow up before our eyes (“she’s so sexy”), and then fall like rotten apples (“she’s so raunchy”). We cast our gaze around looking for the next child star we can take from the innocence of the cradle to the muck of exploitation in a never ending cycle of “fresh meat.”

What can we do to get out of the crashing waves? The answer is simple, but not. The answer is to find some shore on which to ground ourselves.

There is, of course, only one place to ground ourselves that will stop the motion tiredness. Solomon pursued the “new,” the “novel,” until he was sick of it. His conclusion?

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. – Ecclesiastes 12:13